ink on paper is still superior
Jan 04 '00
Electronic books do have a raison d’être but at least in their current form they’re no replacement for the printed page. I’ll gladly sit down with a printed book in the evening and read a hundred pages before going to bed but I certainly won’t read that much text on-screen.
I have not used a Rocket eBook, EB Dedicated Reader, SoftBook Reader or any of the other standalone products for e-books but I have downloaded text files and PDF books. It’s just too painful to read large amounts of text on a pixel-based screen. I’ve got a 20" monitor with a nice video card, a ton of RAM and VRAM displaying 24-bit color and I typically run it at 1152 pixels by 870 pixels but even if I sacrificed some performance and went to a higher pixel setting, I’d still get at most a bit over a hundred pixels per inch. Even the best of the standalone products don’t reach 200 pixels per inch. Printed books typically have the printing plates output at 2540 dots per inch on high-end image setters. Even allowing for the difference in readability of ink on paper versus pixels on screen, it will be several years before reading text on a screen approaches the comfort level of reading ink on paper.
All that said, electronic books are not totally without merit. Authors who can’t find a publisher to take a gamble on a 10,000 copy press run of their first novel probably can get it published as an e-book. Thousands of public domain texts can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg and other sources. Seventy gazillion trees can be spared the indignity of being turned into software manuals that nobody reads if the manuals are distributed in an electronic format instead of a print format. And hey, I’ve done a bit of publishing in Adobe Acrobat’s PDF format; for example my version of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is available at
http://www.carney.com/etexts/swift/a_modest_proposal.pdf
I suppose that e-books will become increasingly popular and I’ll publish more of them myself, but given the choice, I’d still rather have the printed page.
The question as posed by Epinions:
A number of devices have been introduced to allow people to store and read electronic versions of books. Are these products worth buying? What is it like to read an E-Book?
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Epinions.com ID:
erik_kosberg
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Location: Minneapolis, MN
Reviews written: 118
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About Me:
A science experiment with inconclusive results
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